Friday, December 18, 2009

Mexico's Abortion Debate

Exodus's own Alexis Okeowo checks in from Mexico City with a note on the growing polarization due to the abortion debate. To my immense satisfaction, the piece dings Beatriz Paredes. Here's the intro:
Communities are split by the wedge of abortion rights, with pro-choice and anti-abortion doctors working tensely together in the same public hospitals and protesters yelling outside: It's a familiar image in the United States, but lately abortion has polarized another country perhaps even more. Just two years after Mexico City became the first major Latin American capital to legalize it, abortion has become a flashpoint for social conflict throughout the country. Today, a wave of anti-abortion legislation is moving across Mexico's states and towns, and both abortion-rights and anti-abortion activists and legislators are preparing for full-blown war.

As in the United States, the conflict is as much about politics as it is about abortion. Mexican political parties here have found that the touchy social topic is a useful polarizer -- one that fires up voters on both sides. With the presidential election coming up in 2012, parties are already trying to line up fervent supporters. So recently, the moderate Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has joined the ruling conservative National Action Party (PAN) in backing anti-abortion reforms. The PRI's decision is a major political gamble. A party from the center that was in power for decades before being unseated by PAN presidents Vicente Fox in 2000 and Felipe Calderón in 2006, the PRI is betting that abortion might just be the issue that could attract just enough conservative voters to bulk up its usual moderate core, snag PAN's base -- and repay Calderón the electoral favor.

2 comments:

David Agren said...

This article is timely, but I fail to see this issue as all that polarizing in Mexico - although it does have some polarizing figures. (Pro-Vida is run by the oft-controversial Jorge Serrano Limon, who is disliked by many on his side of the debate.)

Where is the "choice" side of this argument? The PSD party, which tried making abortion a major campaign issue, lost its registration because it failed to reach the minimum-vote threshold in the 2009 midterms. Its former candidate, Patricia Mercado, won a modest, but impressive, vote total in 2006 by championing this issue - along with gay rights and drug legalization - but lost a power struggle with others in the party and has been ineffective ever since.

As for the PRI's motives, this intro states that the PRI is looking to add to its moderate core by drawing in the hard right - often known as El Yunque.

"Moderate" is perhaps not the right word since the PRI still depends heavily on the old corporatist practices of herding campesinos and union members - among others - to the polls come election time.

It could be argued, instead, that the PRI really isn't all that moderate and just likes to project that image. The Jalisco PRI, for example, is reputedly more conservative and tight with the Catholic church than the PAN in that state. And what's with PRI State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto going to receive the Pope's blessing for his marriage? This is the next presidential candidate of a party that supposedly champions the separation of church and state?)

This intro also fails to neglect the PRD's role as the enabler for all of this. The PRD is so damaged and discredited of late that voters anxious to dump the PAN are flocking to the PRI - even those with pro-choice convictions.

It must be said, too, that the PRD factions linked with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have never displayed much enthusiasm for the abortion issue and the Lopez Obrador, himself, was making enormous attempts to be on the good side of the Catholic hierarchy during his time as mayor as he prepared for his 2006 presidential run.

pc said...

Those are all fair points. To be perfectly honest, it definitely less heated here than any abortion debate I've seen in the States. Part of that I figure comes from being removed from the political center of the country, but even when I talk about it with young single women whose friends have had abortions and aren't outright hostile to the practice, abortion provokes more ambivalence than anything.

RE the PRI, I dont think it's really moderate at all so much as all over the map depending on the issue and the priista. And yeah for exactly the reasons you say, it's all about keeping their clients happy and getting them to the polls. On oil policy, they collectively are much more extreme than what has been considered the far left in lots of other countries. On abortion, whether for moral reasons or political ones, they are, within the broad scope of the West, very far right. I'd not heard that about the Jalisco PRI

RE the PRD, very true and it goes beyond abortion. Their problem is much deeper than policy and ideology, people just dont trust the way they practice politics on any issue, and with good reason. And they make worse by not laying out their principals, and existing simply to block Calderon. AMLO's not the whole party, but their core message of the last three years has essentially been, Down with the Mafia, and that just doesnt resonate.